That’s All That, Folks!

Yesterday started out like any other day, I was feeling upset and took myself off to Starbucks to trick my body into thinking sugar = happiness. Whilst there, my mood was lifted, but someone else’s had taken a turn for the worst. And it was on that afternoon I read on Amanda Bynes’ personal twitter account that she’d announced her retirement from acting at the age of 24.

Whilst she still has one film left in the can, albeit in a supporting role, I can’t help but be a little upset by this news. Amanda Bynes has always been my favourite actress, and someone whose films and TV shows I’ve turned to when I want cheering up. But yesterday she denounced those roles, tweeting she “only acted like the characters the producers or directors wanted” her to.

It seems from the moment Amanda Bynes started tweeting her thoughts to the world, her career ground to a halt. The only projects secured for her during this time were two magazine covershoots, and a small part in an upcoming Farrelly Brothers film called Hall Pass. However, that role fell through, with Amanda citing scheduling conflicts as the reason she had to pull out (and then, all her tweets about her involvement with Hall Pass were removed from her account).

I’ve been an Amanda Bynes fan since I was 13, and we’re the same age. I like to think I’ve followed her career close enough to know her more than most people, but the simple truth is you can never really know any person – you only know what they want you to know. Never was this more apparent with Amanda than when she would take to her twitter in the early hours of the morning and share her emotions. The Amanda Bynes on twitter, @chicky, turned out to be nothing like the girl I thought I’d grown up with. It remains to be seen whether, as I feel myself sometimes going through, Amanda Bynes has just hit something of a quarter-life crisis. We can all admit to looking back 6, or even 4 years ago, and being unable to recognise the person we used to be. I like to be reminded of the opposite of this fact: that in 2 or 3 years I’ll look back and hopefully see that I made the right choices and because of this, my life has been changed for the better.